Your data Is crucial to a robotic age. Shouldn’t you be paid for it?

The idea is gaining momentum in Silicon Valley and beyond: Facebook and the other technological Goliaths offering free online services — from which they harvest data from and about their users — should pay for every nugget of information they reap.

Users’ data is a valuable commodity. Facebook offers advertisers precisely targeted audiences based on user profiles. YouTube, too, uses users’ preferences to tailor its feed. Still, this pales in comparison with how valuable data is about to become, as the footprint of artificial intelligence extends across the economy.